New Year, Same Me

Well, here I am again.  Another few years older.  Hopefully a little wiser (maybe).  But I'm definitely here. 

I'm still here.

I used to write in blogs.  My first blog was called "Wittie Cooper" a pun on the character from The Wonder Years, Winnie Cooper.  I thought that was so clever at the time because I fancied myself to be somewhat witty- although the fact that no one seemed to get the reference probably disproved that. Still, it gave me the arena to write about my life in a light and humorous way.  

I took pauses from that to write a blog about local restaurants in the Sarasota/Bradenton area.  I then had a blog about my pregnancy journey.  I even had a brief blog in which I reviewed books.  But all of these have since dried up, either because the relevance or interest did as well.

But a general, humorous blog about my life?  I always seem to come back to that.  I don't think my life is particularly interesting- on the contrary, it's quite average.  I'm in grad school to become a librarian or archivist (whichever comes down the pipe first) and in the meantime I'm working part-time at a library.  I'm a wife.  I'm a mother.  I'm a sister and sister-in-law.  I'm a homeowner in the suburbs of Lakewood Ranch who enjoys reading bawdy novels and jogging in my free time and submitting myself to binge-watch whatever television show craze that Facebook and real friends and NPR pummel at me.

I'm just your average 34 year old millennial Caucasian female.

I know what you are thinking...why should I care about what you have to say?  Why am I passing up hours of social media scrolling fun to read about her life?  And what's the deal with the title of this blog, "Sugar & Vice"?  I mean, it's a cute pun and all but what does that say about her?  Is she going to talk about how she bravely overcame some incredible adversity like addiction or abuse to suddenly become enlightened about life?

Let me answer those questions backward.  No, I have not battled some terrible predicaments or personal anguish in my life, at least none that would merit inheriting the answers to the universe.  Next, I named the blog "Sugar & Vice" because it IS a cute pun (thank you for noticing) but also because it best describes the dual sides of my personality- happy yet suspicious, upbeat yet disheartened, proud yet ashamed.  These two pieces always appear in my life, a constant struggle between the yin and yang inside of me, which does sometimes lead to amusing results.  At the very least, they're my personal truths.  And that leads me to your final question.

This blog is about my truth.  In this time of social media, where EVERYONE is constantly sharing the insights into their lives (sometimes maybe a little too much) this is the only way I know how to push my little nugget of truth out on the constantly consuming conveyor belt of existence as we know it now.  

If you're not blogging, you're not breathing.  And by that I mean, if you aren't sharing, then it seems like you don't even exist anymore.

Now again, that's not to say I am going to be submitting Debbie Downer posts.  What interests me is finding the humor in life, even in the scary and sad moments.  Especially in these moments, actually, because it's only in these moments that the light of humor shines most brightly and warms the cold lonely center that we ALL live in.  We ALL have those moments, whether we share them on Facebook or not.

So that's why you're here.  You're here because you wanted to read about someone who has also stubbed their toe on the grocery cart and pretended you were just trying to get dirt off your shoe, or walked into a spider web and panicked and started flailing your arms in front of your neighbors.  You're here to not feel alone.  And hopefully have a chuckle at the same time.

Because I'm not better than you.  I'm just like you.

Ok, now that we have gotten formal introductions out of the way, if you are still curious about what you have gotten yourself into, I encourage you to read on.